Creation of regions for dialect features using a cellular automaton

An issue in dialect research has been how to make generalizations from survey data about where some dialect feature might be found. Pre-computational methods included drawing isoglosses or using shadings to indicate areas where an analyst expected a feature to be found. The use of computers allowed for faster plotting of locations where any given feature had been e¬licited, and also allowed for the use of statistical techniques from technical geography to estimate regions where particular features might be found. However, using the computer did not make the analysis less subjective than isoglosses, and statistical methods from technical geography have turned out to be limited in use. We have prepared a cellular automaton (CA) for use with data collected for the Linguistic Atlas Project that can address the problems involved in this type of data visualization. The CA plots the locations where survey data was elicited, and then through the application of rules creates an estimate of the spatial distributions of selected features. The application of simple rules allows the CA to create objective and reproducible estimates based on the data it was given, without the use of statistical methods

A shift of allegiance: The case of Erie and the North / Midland boundary

The city of Erie, Pennsylvania represents an anomalous case in the dialect geography of North America. According to all available historical records, it was linguistically aligned with the North in the early part of the 20 th century: the lexical data presented in Kurath (1949) and Carver (1987) locate Erie within most of the Northern isoglosses, and the phonological data presented in Kurath and McDavid (1961) show that Erie shared nearly all of its phonological features with the North and only a few with the Midland. However, recent research for the Atlas of North American English (Labov et al. 2006) shows that Erie is now a Midland city, and the two ANAE speakers from Erie show no traces of the Northern Cities Shift. Crucially, the two pivot points in the vowel system, as defined by Labov (1991), show clear Midland characteristics: short-a exhibits raising before all nasals, but not the general raising of the NCS, and both speakers have a complete merger of the vowels in cot and caught. Erie’s shift from being a Northern city to a Midland city is surprising given that the North/Midland boundary is the most clearly defined dialect boundary in North America today (Labov et al. 2006). Furthermore, it would not be predicted by dialect diffusion models that only take population and distance into account, such as Trudgill’s (1974) Gravity Model: Buffalo and Cleveland, the large Northern Cities along Lake Erie on either side of Erie are more populous and closer to Erie than Pittsburgh, the nearest large Midland city. The current study provides a more detailed characterization of Erie, and presents vowel measurements from seven Erieites, ranging in age from 25 to 60. I n general, the results confirm ANAE’s finding that Erie is aligned with the Midland. H owever, the vowels systems of the Erie speakers are different from the neighboring Midland speakers in two respects. First of all, /ow/ does not participate in the strong fronting that is characteristic of Pittsburgh/Western PA: only the youngest speaker (a 25-year-old female) shows an F2 value for /ow/ that is higher than would be expected for a Northern speaker. Furthermore, while all speakers clearly have the low-back merger, the phonetic realization of the resulting phoneme is unrounded and lower than the distinctly rounded and raised open-o of the Pittsburgh area. Thus, while Erie is clearly phonologically aligned with Pittsburgh, the two regions are not phonetically identical. This realignment with the Midland suggests that Pittsburgh has had a stronger influence on Erie since the middle of the 20 th century than either of the two large nearby Northern cities. Qualitative evidence from sociolinguistic interviews will be presented to confirm this and to show that Erieites have more contact with speakers from Pittsburgh than either Buffalo or Cleveland. Much of this contact stems from the popularity of Erie as a summer vacation destination for residents of Pittsburgh, evidenced by the fact that some Erieites refer to these summer vacationers from Pittsburgh as mups (from come up ). It will be argued that this higher density of communication caused Erie to shift its phonological allegiance from the North to the Midland, and, consequently, that any model of dialect diffusion must take communication patterns into account in order to be fully explanatory

The permeability of dialect boundaries: a case study of the region surrounding Erie, Pennsylvania

This dissertation presents a dialectological study of the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, and the neighboring towns in the boundary area between the North and Midland dialect regions. The field work conducted for this dissertation consists of interviews, word lists, minimal pair tests, and grammatical acceptability judgments. In total, data from 106 speakers was analyzed to determine the course of linguistic change in the city of Erie and the current location of the dialect boundaries in the neighboring regions. In order to process the acoustic data from this large corpus, the methodology of transcription and subsequent forced alignment was applied. In order to reduce error in the formant measurements, automatic techniques for measurement point selection and formant prediction were developed. The acoustic analysis focuses on aspects of the vowel system that differentiate the North and the Midland. The results show that the merger of /o/ and /oh/ began in the city of Erie before 1900, and that it subsequently spread to Ripley, NY. On the other hand, Erie is still located on the Northern side of the boundary with respect to the fronting of the back upgliding vowels /uw/, /ow/, and /aw/. Finally, an analysis of the lexical and morphosyntactic variables shows a widespread acceptability of the Midland features in Erie. In the final section of the dissertation, the early settlement history of the region is examined, and Erie\u27s acceptance of several Midland features is explained by the early presence of a large contingent of non-Northern, especially Scots-Irish, settlers

AMBIGUOUS APPALACHIANNESS: A LINGUISTIC AND PERCEPTUAL INVESTIGATION INTO ARC-LABELED PENNSYLVANIA COUNTIES

The Appalachian Regional Commission (2022) designates 52 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties as Appalachia, excluding only the southeast portion of the state. Matthew Ferrence, in Appalachia North, states that his home is sometimes called Appalachia, sometimes Rust Belt, other times Midwest, even though very few who live there would accept any of those labels as correct (xi). This ambiguous and fluid identity is due to the shaping, forming, and changing of Pennsylvania’s role within society from a founding colony to a thriving state with industry, unselfishly spoiling others, to the grounds of converging identities (Ferrence xi). This ambiguous identity makes the voice of Northern Appalachian speakers difficult to capture. Watt and Llamas (2017: 193) note that place is not just a location, but rather “states of mind, stances, attitudes, and the status that individuals hold within their social networks and society at large.” Historically, and even currently, stereotyping and defining these Appalachian regions has come from “outsiders” or “spectators” within society that continue add dynamic and fluid definitions that vary depending on a multitude of contexts (Ulack and Raitz 1982). Both language use and language perception play a big part “in how territories bounded by borders with their neighbors are defined” (Watt and Llamas 2017:191). By looking at language and perceptual excerpts from the Linguistic Atlas Project and present-day interviews with Northern Appalachian speakers themselves, one can compare these linguistic patterns with other patterns studied in Appalachian Englishes and investigate the identities of these speakers to understand where Pennsylvania fits into the region that is Appalachia, giving writers, researchers, and society voices and identities to capture

Understanding U.S. regional linguistic variation with Twitter data analysis

We analyze a Big Data set of geo-tagged tweets for a year (Oct. 2013–Oct. 2014) to understand the regional linguistic variation in the U.S. Prior work on regional linguistic variations usually took a long time to collect data and focused on either rural or urban areas. Geo-tagged Twitter data offers an unprecedented database with rich linguistic representation of fine spatiotemporal resolution and continuity. From the one-year Twitter corpus, we extract lexical characteristics for twitter users by summarizing the frequencies of a set of lexical alternations that each user has used. We spatially aggregate and smooth each lexical characteristic to derive county-based linguistic variables, from which orthogonal dimensions are extracted using the principal component analysis (PCA). Finally a regionalization method is used to discover hierarchical dialect regions using the PCA components. The regionalization results reveal interesting linguistic regional variations in the U.S. The discovered regions not only confirm past research findings in the literature but also provide new insights and a more detailed understanding of very recent linguistic patterns in the U.S

“Local, but intelligent”: Language Ideologies in the Informant Biographies of the Linguistic Atlas Project

This thesis argues for the relevance of the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) for studies of language ideologies, indexicality, and enregisterment. The LAP represents the largest dialect survey of North American English to date, offering an abundance of historical linguistic data for research in dialectology, linguistic geography, and variation over space and time. Additionally, the LAP also contains additional sources of sociolinguistic data, including informant biographies — documents written by fieldworkers at the conclusion of the LAP interview that summarize an informant’s demographic profile, as well as their personality, speech, and caliber as an interviewee. Rife with subjective judgments from the fieldworker, informant biographies present the opportunity for the study of language ideologies in the LAP. This thesis performs a qualitative discourse analysis of 583 informant biographies collected as part of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS). Focusing on analysis of pragmatic features, this study reveals the ways that language ideologies, indexicality, and enregisterment are encoded into informant biographies and the LAP more broadly. This analysis suggests that linguistic data in the LAP can be understood as products of an indexical, ideological, and enregistered negotiation of language and identity, co-constructed between informants and fieldworkers

Asia Minor Greek: Towards a Computational Processing

AbstractIn this paper, we discuss issues concerning the computational aspect of an on-going research project which aims at providing a systematic study of three Greek dialects of Asia Minor (“Pontus, Cappadocia, Aivali: In search of Asia Minor Greek”- AmiGre) In fact, the project constitutes the first attempt to describe dialectal phenomena at a phonological, morphological, and structural level. Furthermore, it also constitutes the first attempt in Greece to combine Informatics and Theoretical Lin- guistics in order to facilitate the above-mentioned task. The aim here is to provide the design principles of the computational component of the project namely, an electronic dictionary and a multimedia database which would provide an innovative mechanism of storing, processing and retrieving oral and written dialectal data

Computational Models of Dialectal Variation and Underlying Linguistic Features

The report illustrates the results of the joint research activity carried out from June 13th to July 4th 2010 at the University of Groningen - Faculty of Arts - Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG) directed by Prof. John Nerbonne. In particular, it illustrates the application and specialization of the technique of "hierarchical bipartite spectral graph partitioning" (Wieling and Nerbonne, 2010) with respect to the dialectal corpus of the Atlante Lessicale Toscano (\u27Lexical Atlas of Tuscany\u27, henceforth ALT) and discusses achieved results. The analysis focuses on the level of phonetic variation: this is the level of analysis for which an aggregate analysis of the ALT dialectal corpus has provided divergent results compared to the analyses by Giannelli (1976, 2000) and Pellegrini (1977), as documented in Montemagni (2007, 2008). Phonetic variation in Tuscany thus provides a particularly challenging case study to test the potential of this new analysis technique to study models of linguistic variation